


walk through this wicked world

by nothingunrealistic



Category: Billions (TV)
Genre: (it's Ben/Winston), Alternative Perspective, Canon Compliant, Canon Non-Binary Character, Gen, Implied Relationships, gratuitous references to opera AND architecture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-29
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2020-07-24 20:33:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20020612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingunrealistic/pseuds/nothingunrealistic
Summary: Can Taylor's day get any worse after losing most of a billion dollars to Axe's latest plan for revenge? Apparently it can.





	walk through this wicked world

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a testament to exactly two facts: 1) the season 4 finale of Billions was far more satisfying than I ever expected (which is why nearly all the dialogue here is lifted straight from it), and 2) Asia Kate Dillon HAS the range.
> 
> Title from "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding".

Taylor pushes open the doors of Taylor Mason Capital that night — heavy and industrial, a reminder of what this building was before their name was on it — trying not to ruminate too long on the fact that it’ll take a miracle to save their firm now.

Then they step out of the building to find a black SUV waiting for them at the curb, and hear “hold up —” as shadowed figures in suits approach from all sides, and they realize that one miracle won’t be nearly enough.

Footsteps behind, from the right. Taylor turns to see a round-headed silhouette, suit-clad like the rest, coming closer, and, once at the streetlight overhead, a heart-sinkingly familiar face.

It's Rhoades — Chuck Rhoades, to be specific, State Attorney General, the most ruthless and corrupt motherfucker in New York outside of Axe Capital, and as of late, thick as the thieves they are with the most ruthless and corrupt motherfucker _inside_ Axe Capital. The only reason this isn’t a perp walk is that it isn’t happening in broad daylight for the convenience of the entire journalistic population of Brooklyn. What kind of treatment comes to someone that even Chuck Rhoades doesn’t want to be seen apprehending?

Rhoades speaks.

“You’re not under arrest, but it would be good if you act like you are.”

Is this meant to be reassuring? He’s flashing an approximation of a smile.

Well. Resisting this ostensibly fake arrest would clearly be futile, might even turn it into a genuine arrest. And Taylor doesn’t doubt they could give a convincing performance of “barely restrained terror at being taken into legal custody right outside my own building” at the moment. 

They breathe in, look around, breathe out, and walk forward. 

A firm hand presses against their back, ushering them unnecessarily toward the car door. Their first instinct is to pull away, like at the Alpha Cup those countless months ago, recoiling from everyone who just had to reach out and touch Axe’s brilliant new pawn. But they’re not an intern anymore, not under anyone’s protection except their own. Retreat is not an option. So they keep moving without flinching or faltering and step into the car, back straight, stomach churning, and head high.

* * *

Today’s events so far are, on reflection, what most people might call an “absolute fucking nightmare.” Taylor appreciates nightmares, usually, as reminders of how much better their current existence is by comparison. And the situation does have a certain dreamlike quality to it — confronted outside their own front door already in the midst of a crisis, whisked away late at night by the State Attorney General’s order, and reassured all the while that this isn’t an arrest, it just feels like one.

All the same, with every passing minute, the feeling that they won’t be waking up any time soon only grows.

It’s late, well past the close of market hours. Who would have been left in the building to see Taylor being taken, or even their Mini abandoned in the parking lot? Most of the analysts and traders they have leave once after-hours trading is finished every day, if not earlier. Mafee went straight home from Rudy’s place. Sara left maybe five minutes before Taylor did — she could easily have walked right past Rhoades without realizing. Winston was keeping fairly standard hours for a while, at Taylor’s insistence, but ever since the comp debacle he’s been slipping back into leaving later and later. And Lauren…

Taylor doesn’t know what she might have seen, but they know they never wanted her to see them like this.

The car slams around the sharp turn from Park Row to Broadway, and Taylor clings to their seatbelt to avoid sliding into the impassive officer at their right, or losing their equilibrium completely. This ride has lasted ten, maybe fifteen minutes, but it could be easily mistaken for an eternity.

* * *

Rhoades’s squadron of suits follows him and Taylor into 28 Liberty Plaza and through the halls of the Attorney General’s office, only dispersing when he opens a door bearing a brass plate engraved with his name, gestures for Taylor to enter the dimly lit study beyond the door first (intimidation tactic or oddly timed chivalry? It’s hard to decide,) and offers them a seat in front of a cluttered desk with an open laptop on it. 

After much fussing over the keyboard, Rhoades steps back in satisfaction as a video begins to play — camera footage, taken from over Rudy’s shoulder in his house. The clandestine meeting, the Nigerian oil warrants, Taylor’s offer to listen all unreel with a creeping sense of _jamais vu_ until he cuts in again. “That right there is the very picture of criminal conduct.”

Well, sure. If you crop out ninety percent of a picture, you can make a case for the other ten percent being whatever you like. “And the part where I refuse and walk out?”

“There’s always a camera malfunction…” Rhoades says it like he’s confiding a secret in them, and the secret is _the truth is irrelevant and if I want to put you in prison I’ll make it happen._

This is no nightmare. This is painful reality. “I see.” Retreat is not an option. Taylor’s hands are trembling under the table. Retreat is not an option. “Well, in that case, I’d like to speak to —”

“Or, at least…” Rhoades slaps the laptop shut, circling his desk to sit across from them. “That was to be the case, when you balked at the illicit deal. But, uh… I’ve lost my taste for this particular setup right now.”

“Have you?” That seems as likely as Axe losing his taste for making Taylor’s life difficult, or for quoting _The Godfather._

“When I look at the shambles my life has become… from my firing, to my public disgrace, to my election with strings attached… to the destruction of my marriage.” He laughs joylessly at that. “My family falling into disrepair. Did I make mistakes to cause it?” A turn of the head that’s something like a nod. “Perhaps.”

Briefly, Taylor wonders how Wendy went all those years without giving in to the urge to slap Rhoades in the face outside of their bedroom. That doctor’s oath, maybe.

“But a truer reckoning is,” and Rhoades is speaking in something between a whisper and a hiss, “it all tracks back to one source. One man.” 

Of course — of course he means Axe, even if he won’t say the name. Buying the Chrysler Building was a waste of Axe’s money — he already casts a longer shadow than any skyscraper.

“A man so corrosive, so virulently infective as to strip me of every good quality I ever had. My kindness, my empathy, my sense of justice. Maybe even my ability to love.”

 _Because that’s what Axe Cap does to a person._

Taylor knows, logically, that Rhoades is only talking about himself; he’s far too self-centered to attempt to get in their head right now. But that fear, the feeling that Bobby Axelrod has pushed you into discarding every principle you once held dear, giving up the shreds of your humanity for the sake of your survival, bending until you break — it resonates, stronger than it should, and it’s all they can do not to shake.

_(Axe took you for granted and now you’re doing the same to us —)_

“And that very man charged me with arresting _you.”_

This was to be the final blow, then. Putting Taylor behind bars without evidence but with the State Attorney General in his pocket to make it happen anyway.

“In order to force you back into his employ.”

…That doesn’t make sense. Not after spending the better part of a year being sabotaged and slandered by Axe at every chance he got.

Does it?

“He wants me to come back to work for him, at Axe Capital.” Surely Taylor could have just misheard. “He wants that.”

“Yes. Which… gives us an opening.” _Us_ — he expects this to be a joint effort? “I don’t want to force you.”

Rhoades leans over his desk, jaw clenched, eyes steely, no humor to be found now.

“I want you to go back willingly, but as if I had, and I want you to help me take him _down._ Once and for all.”

The offer hangs in the air, like the strains of _Nessun dorma_ had in Rudy’s house even after he’d stopped singing. It’s been lingering on a loop in Taylor’s head too, a mix of his rendition and Pavarotti’s standard. _Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me, il nome mio nessun saprà, ma il mio mistero…_ A more fitting choice than Rudy likely realized — it’s the victory song of a man who’s overcome every challenge set to him by an enemy, and given them one more opportunity to beat him. Either uncover his weakness and kill him without fear, or fail and be bound to him forever.

It’s no choice at all.

* * *

The little green room, which Taylor is going to great lengths not to think of as a cell, is sparsely furnished, with the air conditioning blasting hard enough to keep the Svalbard seed vault in pristine condition. They sit perfectly still, hands folded on the laminate tabletop, for maybe ten minutes before Axe opens the door. By the time he closes it, they’ve decided they need to get in the first word.

“I should have known what would happen. I once confessed to you that competition brought on vertigo-like symptoms in me. Well, I certainly feel faint right now.” Yet again, they’re hardly acting — it’s a miracle they haven’t had to retreat to a bathroom somewhere to vomit today.

“Tighten your stomach.” Axe waves his hands as if to demonstrate. “It’ll push the blood back up into your brain. You’ll feel better.”

“It won’t help my firm, or my balance sheet, which you destroyed.” 

“I didn’t make you cook the books, though,” Axe says, dripping condescension. “That was all you.”

 _All you_ isn’t a pronunciation of _thanks to me decimating your AUM and sending the State AG to your doorstep right behind an obvious mole_ that Taylor’s ever heard before. “I figured an extra quarter or two without redemptions and disruptions and I could make a comeback.”

“Well, we always think we can.”

“But then you had your _friend_ waiting to arrest me, so I can’t.”

Axe chuckles as he sits. “He’s no friend of mine, believe me. Just a useful tool.”

And isn’t that interesting? Rhoades and Axe, both pretending they’re a team devoted to taking down Taylor, and yet both privately admitting to Taylor that the blood they most want to see spilled is one another’s.

“And I wasn’t gonna let him take you to jail. As long as —”

“Yes. As long as I ‘come under heel.’” Not that Rhoades, or anyone else, had said it quite so bluntly out loud, but they hardly needed to. 

“Well. Don’t think of it like that. Or do. Whichever. But yes, you are coming back to me.”

Taylor says nothing. If they didn’t know Rhoades was on their side, they’d walk out right now and ask him to go ahead and take them to jail after all. 

“You were such a worthy fucking adversary that even with a much smaller bankroll, you cost me my relationship and pushed me to a stalemate, right ‘til the very end.”

He and Rhoades are mirror images of one another, aren’t they? Right down to blaming anyone but themselves for methodically alienating the women they allegedly love. Either one of them would shoot himself in the foot and turn his gun on the other to seek revenge — for years now they’ve been destroying themselves just to kill their doppelgängers.

“So yeah, I want you on my side.” He jabs a finger in their direction. “Won’t be forever. I’ll walk away soon enough, and your firm will have survived.”

“Will it have?”

“It’s gonna be up to you. But it can. Should. Still you.”

Still them, with the addition of Axe breathing down their neck in person rather than from across the East River. “So how would it work? I keep my own shingle?”

“Yes. Under my banner.”

“And you and I are going to, what, bullshit about ideas all day long?” Taylor’s almost interested in the logistics of this plan now. If it didn’t have to involve Axe thinking he’s getting away with blackmail, they’d be fully interested.

“Well, we don’t have to be best friends,” Axe says. “Or friends of any kind. I just want your brain.” Retreat is not an option. Retreat is not an option. Taylor hates him so fucking much. Retreat is not an option. “It won’t all be bad for you, we’ll preset a bonus structure. And you will know exactly where you will end up.”

“That will be a signed document.” They’ll be damned if they’re going to let Axe weasel his way out of giving them every dollar he promises a second time. 

“It will. And we will also have a separate special document, signed by Rhoades, too, that says at a date certain, whatever he has on you disappears forever.” 

Extortion with an expiration date. Why is Axe so willing to let this arrangement be temporary? Does he expect to thoroughly defang Mase Cap after a few months, or even years, of profiting from their plays, and have no use for them afterwards?

Let him think so, then. Only a fool would turn down the halves of the Get Out Of Jail Free card being offered to them by Rhoades and now Axe. 

And Taylor’s no fool.

* * *

* * *

The security guard stationed on the first floor ought to ask for identification before letting Taylor and their team past the front desk, but his jaw drops when he sees them at the head of the line, and he waves them through without a single question, wide-eyed. Taylor doesn’t recognize him from their own time at Axe Cap, but it would be just like Axe to fire anyone in his building who couldn’t identify Taylor Mason on sight.

They haven’t crossed this threshold since… the day before the Spartan-Ives capital raise? Months and months ago, almost as long as they’d worked for Axe rather than against him. Not nearly long enough — just standing in the lobby still tightens their shoulders and constricts their lungs. Breathing shouldn’t be this difficult. 

“Hey.” A light brush of hands — Lauren’s caught up to them, falling into step as they approach the elevator. “You ready for this?”

In other words, _are you okay?_ “Is it possible to be ready to walk into a lions’ den unarmored?” _Not even close._

“We’re walking in with you,” Lauren says, as simply as she’d agreed to go back to Axe Cap with Taylor before even knowing why, and what greater miracle could they have asked for than that?

Taylor presses the call button for an elevator going up; it lights up and beeps softly.

They wait.

“Did Pei design this place?” Sara says. “I didn’t know Axe was throwing stones from a literal glass house here.” 

A ding from the elevator, and the doors slide open. Taylor enters first, Sara following them.

“If anything, it’s a glass mansion.” Lauren squeezes between Sara and Taylor to settle in the back, with Winston trailing her — they’ve been surprisingly friendly for the past few days.

“Never thought I’d ride in this elevator again,” Winston says. Taylor can see him tightening the straps of his backpack in the mirrored walls. 

They straighten their own coat. “Neither did I.”

It’s quiet just long enough for Taylor to press the button for their floor and watch the doors slide together. Once the elevator starts to rise, Mafee launches into the story of the last time he was here and how he evaded being removed from the building just long enough to give Wendy (and Bonnie, and Bill, and Victor, and…) a piece of his mind, clearly seeking Lauren’s attention but mostly getting comments from Sara about how lax the security here must be. Behind Taylor, Winston edges forward and whispers in their ear. 

“This is weird, right? Just walking in like this?”

Taylor nods. “Axe is letting down his defenses. It’s an unusual move for him.”

“Didn’t realize it would be so easy to slip past his shield.”

So Sara wasn’t the only one who appreciated the war talk. “That’s an excellent way of putting it.”

In the mirrors, Winston’s mouth tilts into something like a smile. “So when do we get to stab him in the heart?”

Taylor smiles back, just long enough for the elevator’s ascent to slow to a stop. Another ding, and the doors open on Axe Capital. 

They’d hoped that their return would be an inconspicuous affair, that Axe might have given everyone the day off or called them all to a meeting in another room, or at the very least ensured they were all hard at work. No such luck — half the analysts and traders on the floor are just standing around and talking, clearly awaiting the arrival of Taylor and their team yet shocked to see them anyway. Heads turn, conversations peter out, and smiles vanish. All that’s missing is a record scratch and a rapidly deflating brass band.

Axe comes sauntering down the stairs from the C-suite just as Taylor walks onto the main floor — and still on the mezzanine, Wendy hovers above the crowd, hesitant but unquestionably present. The Pancreatic Cancer Research Foundation must have truly appreciated Axe’s generous and undoubtedly selfless donation.

Taylor comes to a stop, and the massive office becomes painfully quiet.

Ben breaks the silence. 

“Hi, Taylor. Hi, Mafee,” he blurts out, beaming, but his gaze falls somewhere between them, and Taylor hardly has to hear Winston suck in a breath (he’s nearly drowned out by Bill’s grumbling anyway) to know exactly who Ben’s looking at.

“Hi, Ben,” Mafee mutters back. Ben looks like he might cry from happiness.

Axe threads his way through the crowd, taking his time, and emerges between Ari and Helena, coming to stand before Taylor. He spreads his arms as if to offer an embrace, or to say _look upon my kingdom and its subjects, you’re one of them again._

“Welcome home.”

This building isn’t home, of course. Home isn’t in Manhattan, any more than it was in Westport, or even Brooklyn, as much as they loved the brick and stone and timber of Mase Cap. If Taylor’s home is anywhere, it’s in Mafee’s admiration and Sara’s persistence, in Winston’s insight and Lauren’s trust. And if Axe tries to take any of that away, he’ll have a whole new war on his hands.

“Happy to be here.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! You can find me on Tumblr @nothingunrealistic.


End file.
